Agricultural Biotechnology - International Service for the ...

1 1(A Lot More than Just GM Crops) Agricultural Biotechnology2 All living organisms have the ability to improve themselves through natural means in order to adapt to changing environmental conditions. However, it takes hundreds of years before any detectable improvement is obtained. Man then learned how to domesticate and breed plants in order to develop crops to his own liking and needs using various means including Biotechnology . Biotechnology is defined as a set of tools that uses living organisms (or parts of organisms) to make or modify a product, improve plants , trees or animals, or develop microorganisms for specific uses. Agricultural Biotechnology is the term used in crop and livestock improvement through Biotechnology tools. This monograph will focus only on Agricultural crop Biotechnology . Biotechnology encompasses a number of tools and elements of conventional breeding techniques, bioinformatics, microbiology, molecular genetics, biochemistry, plant physiology, and molecular biology.

2 The Biotechnology tools that are important for Agricultural Biotechnology include: - Conventional plant breeding - Tissue culture and micropropagation - Molecular breeding or marker assisted selection- Genetic engineering and GM crops- Molecular Diagnostic Tools SandraMatic / Plant BreedingSince the beginning of agriculture eight to ten thousand years ago, farmers have been altering the genetic makeup of the crops they grow. Early farmers selected the best looking plants and seeds and saved them to plant for the next year. The selection for features such as faster growth, higher yields, pest and disease resistance, larger seeds, or sweeter fruits has dramatically changed domesticated plant species compared to their wild relatives. Plant breeding came into being when man learned that crop plants could be artificially mated or cross-pollinated to be able to improve the characters of the plant. Desirable characteristics from different parent plants could be combined in the offspring.

3 When the science of plant breeding was further developed in the 20th century, plant breeders understood better how to select superior plants and breed them to create new and improved varieties of different crops. This has dramatically increased the productivity and quality of the plants we grow for food, feed and plant breeding (Figure 1) has been the method used to develop new varieties of crops for hundreds of years. However, conventional plant breeding can no longer sustain the global demand with the increasing population, decline in Agricultural resources such as land and water, and the apparent plateauing of the yield curve of the staple crops. Thus, new crop improvement technologies should be developed and breedingThe art of recognizing desirable traits and incorporating them into future generations is very important in plant breeding. Breeders inspect their fields and travel long distances in search of individual plants that exhibit desirable traits.

4 A few of these traits occasionally arise spontaneously through a process called mutation, but the natural rate of mutation is very slow and unreliable to produce plants that breeders would like to the late 1920s, researchers discovered that they could greatly increase the number of these variations or mutations by exposing plants to X-rays and mutation-inducing chemicals. Mutation breeding accelerated after World War II, when the techniques of the nuclear age became widely available. plants were exposed to gamma rays, protons, neutrons, alpha particles, and beta particles to see if these would induce useful mutations. Chemicals such as sodium azide and ethyl methanesulphonate, were also used to cause mutations. Mutation breeding efforts continue around the world today. In the 73 years of mutation breeding (1939-2013), a total of 3,218 varieties obtained through mutation breeding have been registered in the IAEA database. Staple crops such as rice has registered 824 varieties, barley (312), wheat (274), maize (96), common bean (57), tomato (20), potato (16), sugarcane (13), soybean (2), as well as other important crops that were improved to possess agronomically-desirable line and hybrid seed technologyThe end result of plant breeding is either an open-pollinated (OP for corn) or inbred (for rice) varieties or an F1 (first filial generation) hybrid variety.

5 OP and inbred varieties, when maintained and properly selected and produced, retain the same characteristics when multiplied. Figure 1. Conventional breeding entails sexual hybridization followed by careful selectionSource: Alfonso, A. 20075 Hybrid seeds are an improvement over OP and inbred seeds in terms of yield, resistance to pests and diseases, and time to seeds are developed by the hybridization or crossing of diversely-related parent lines. Pure lines are offsprings of several cycles of repeated self-pollination that breed true or produce sexual offspring that closely resemble their parents. Pure line development involves firstly, the selection of lines in the existing germplasm which express the desired characteristics such as resistance to pest and diseases, early maturity, yield, and others. These traits may not be present in only one line, thus selected lines are bred together by hand. In self-pollinated plants , flowers are emasculated by removing the anthers or the male part of the flower by hand, and are pollinated by pollen from another line.

6 The female parent is usually the line that possesses the desired agronomic trait while the male parent is the donor of the new trait. F1 (first filial generation) offsprings are planted and selfed, as well as the F2 generation. Breeders then select in the F3 and F4 generation the lines which exhibit their desired agronomic characteristics and the added trait. Testing for resistances to pests and abiotic stresses are conducted also at this time. Lines with desired traits and are rated intermediate to resistant/tolerant to the pests and abiotic stresses are selected and selfed in two to three more generations. Lines which do not lose the new traits and are stable are termed pure lines. In hybrid seed technology, two pure lines with complementing traits and are derived from diversely related parents are bred together by hand. F1 hybrids are tested for hybrid vigor in all agronomic and yield parameters and compared to both parents. The resulting offsprings will usually perform more vigorously than either the technology has been developed, it has brought tremendous impact in major crops including rice, corn, wheat, cotton, and other crops including many vegetables.

7 In the USA, corn yield from 1866 to 1936 was only 26 bu/acre. Adoption of hybrid corn has increased corn yield by bu/ac/yr from 1947-1955. With improved genetics, availability of N fertilizer, chemical pesticide and mechanization, corn grain yield has constantly increased by bushels/acre/year to become 115 bushels in 1990 s to an expected increase of 159 bu/acre in 2012. However, with the Great Drought in the US in 2012, grain yield was only bu/acre. In 2013, an increase of 50 bu/acre of corn yield was rice technology helped China to increase production from 140 million tons in 1978 to 188 million tons in 1990. Since then, hybrid rice has helped increase rice production which yields to 2 tons/hectare more than the ordinary rice, and hence an average yield of to tons/hectare. Hybrid rice production area is expected to increase by more than 6 million hectares in 2012. In September 2012, Yuan Long-pin, the farther of hybrid rice has completed the 6development of super rice DH2525 that sets a new record of hybrid rice yield at the 6th Hybrid Rice Symposium in India in September 2012, Indian government and scientists realized the country s need to increase hectarage of hybrid rice from 2 to 5 million hectares, to be able to increase rice yield by to 2 million tonnes of rice every year, and feed the teeming millions in the next 15 to 20 years.

8 India has 59 hybrid rice varieties released form the public (31 varieties) and private (28 varieties) the proven impact of hybrid seed technology, new tools for hybrid breeding were discovered and utilized for self-pollinating crops including cytoplasmic male sterility (cms). Cytoplasmic male sterility is a condition where the plant is unable to produce functional pollen and would rely on other pollen source to produce seeds. This greatly facilitates large scale hybrid seed production, by-passing hand pollination. Current hybrid seed technology uses three lines in order to produce the hybrid seed: a) the A line which contains a defective mitochondrial genome in the cytoplasm and a suppressed restorer gene, b) the B line which is genetically similar to the A line but contains a normal cytoplasm and a suppressed restorer gene, and c) the restorer line, a distinctly unrelated line which contains normal cytoplasm and an active restorer gene (dominant). The two line hybrid system, another hybrid seed technology relies on temperature and geographic location affecting the nuclear genome of the plant, manifested as male sterile.

9 Hybrid seed technology assures hybrid vigor in the progenies but discovery and development of cms lines requires a lot of work and time. Pure Stable Lines (Inbreds)F1 Repeated self-pollination and selectionParent A XParent BF2F3F4F5F6 HYBRIDH ybridizationFigure 2. Pure line (inbred line) developmentSource: Alfonso, A. 20077 Conventional plant breeding resulting in open pollinated varieties or hybrid varieties has had a tremendous impact on Agricultural productivity over the last decades. While an extremely important tool, conventional plant breeding also has its limitations. First, breeding can only be done between two plants that can sexually mate with each other. This limits the new traits that can be added to those that already exist in that species. Second, when plants are crossed, many traits are transferred along with the trait of interest including traits with undesirable effects on yield potential. Agricultural Biotechnology is an option for breeders to overcome these :Alfonso, A.

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